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Credit Repair Information - Fix Your Credit Using Our Credit Repair Techniques

How to Repair Your Credit - Free Information to Fix Your Credit

Having good credit can mean the difference between getting a loan or not.  But can you repair your credit on your own? Yes you can! Thousands of our readers have removed negatives and increased their credit score by using our ethical "How to Repair Credit" techniques. By the way, everything a credit repair company can do for you, you can do for yourself at a fraction of the cost.

However, we know sometimes people feel overwhelmed with the credit repair process and want to ask a live person a question if they get stumped. If you do, we recommend American Consumer Credit Repair Center. We've had a relationship with them since 2000 and we have visited their corporate office. They offer a FREE initial Credit Consultation (which also includes a Credit Report Summary and Credit Score) and they use the same ethical credit repair techniques we talk about on our website.

Now, before you get started, it's important to know the methods that don't work and can actually hurt your credit repair efforts. We suggest you read these articles: "Myths about Credit Repair" and "Innocent Ways You Can Ruin Your Credit". We might also suggest you watch our credit repair video.

The information provided on this page is mainly intended to help you fix ERRORS on your credit and clean up those "questionable" items. However, the law does allow you to request an investigation of ANY information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete. It is perfectly legal to challenge ANYTHING in your credit bureau file and there is no charge for requesting an investigation.

The whole key to the credit repair procedure is that if a credit bureau cannot verify information on your credit report within the time allowed by law, they must remove it. For instance, if a collection agency is reporting a collection on your report and they cannot verify the information, the credit bureau must delete the entry.

Credit Repair Strategy

Review Your Credit Report

There are a lot of offers out there where you can order your credit reports and get your credit score. Our comparison chart of credit report services will help you decide which one is right for you. Please note: If you go to AnnualCreditReport.com and get your yearly free report, you are not going to see your credit score, which is a crucial tool in getting your credit in shape. You can pay an extra fee to see your scores.

Analyze Your Credit Report

Now that you have your credit reports in your hands, time to figure out what it all means. Our articles "Getting and Reading Your Credit Report" and "Decoding Your Report" are excellent resources to turn to as you start to fix your credit.

You can use the free analyzer which may have been provided to help you figure out which items are lowering your credit score. After reviewing your credit reports, print them out (it's worth the cost of the ink) and then highlight everything you see as a negative listing along with what the computer analysis pointed out.

Rank Negative Items

The article we linked to in the above paragraph showed you how to decode your report. It covered how to identify items as being either positive or negative. Now that you have your list of negative items, you should rank each item according to the amount of damage it is doing to your overall credit score. Rank the most damaging first, followed by the next most damaging, followed by those items which are neutral. Do this for each report, and remember, they may not all have the same information on them. They may even have duplicate information on them. If this is the case, you will need to write to each credit bureau individually for each duplicate item.

The items here are listed in order of "most damaging" to "least damaging" to your credit:

• Bankruptcy


• Foreclosure


• Repossession


• Loan Default


• Court Judgments


• Collections


• Past due payments


• Late Payments


• Credit Rejections


• Credit Inquiries

Also, if your creditor has NOT notified you of negative information they have recently placed on your credit report, they are currently in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. You can use this to pressure the original creditor to remove the listing by reminding them they are in violation of the FCRA by not notifying you.

Write Dispute Letters to the Credit Bureaus

What should you challenge? Everything - and you should always shoot for a complete deletion. In your initial challenge, don't dispute the information within a collection listing, charge-off, court record, repossession, foreclosure, or settled account. Save disputing the information within the listing for the next round of disputes. Start off the reason for your initial dispute on a negative listing whenever possible as "not mine". There is a complete list of the most common dispute reasons further below.

What items are the toughest to get off your report? You will have the toughest time getting bankruptcies, judgments, child support and foreclosures off of your credit report as these things are so easy for the credit bureaus to verify electronically through e-Oscar. In the case of a bankruptcy, you most likely will have a few trade lines saying "included in bankruptcy". If you want to challenge your bankruptcy, you need to clear off all credit lines mentioning a BK FIRST.

Mail Letters Registered or Certified

This is important, as you must be able document when the letters were sent and received. This gives you some leverage with the CRAs if they don't respond in the time frame required by law. Here are some certified mail tips. DON'T USE THE ONLINE DISPUTING SERVICE PROVIDED BY THE CREDIT BUREAUS. You need to be documenting everything, and you want to make sure that you have a complete record of your disputes.

Document and Organize Your Credit Repair Efforts

Now that you have ordered your credit reports, photocopied your dispute letters, kept receipts for mailing them, you need an organizational system to keep track your credit repair efforts. Getting organized is not difficult nor expensive. Invest in a notebook, a file folder and some pens. Write everything down, as you complete tasks. Why is this necessary?

• You need to track how long your credit repair disputes take. If the dispute period goes longer than the 30-45 days specified by law, but you can't prove it, you've missed your chance to delete an item from your report.


• Unfortunately, credit items you have worked so hard to remove sometimes mysteriously reappear. If this happens, it is usually easy to have the items deleted permanently if you show your complete records on the first removal. Why take a chance? (There's more about reappearing items on your report later in the article.)

As you proceed through these steps, keep copies and records of all correspondence you send and receive. Copies of all correspondence are a must, as well as notes on all telephone conversations. Also, if you should encounter any special difficulty and would like help in repairing your credit, you will need these records to proceed.

Back to the point on documenting telephone conversations: every time you talk on the phone with a creditor or credit reporting agency, you must document the conversation by recording the name of the person to whom you spoke, his or her position, their direct line or extension, the date and time of the conversation, what was said in the conversation, and what was agreed upon. If they don't offer up all the information you need, politely ask for it.

What Information Do I Need to Put in My Dispute Letter?

Our article entitled "What Should I Provide When Requesting a Report or Disputing an Item on My Report" lists all the information you will need to include in your letter. You can use this sample credit repair letter and just fill in all of your information.

Where Do I Mail My Credit Repair Dispute Letter?

Here are all the mailing addresses for the credit bureaus.

Wait for the Credit Bureaus to Investigate

Once the credit reporting agency has received your dispute letter, they are obligated to investigate. This obligation is not contingent upon you having been denied credit. According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the credit bureaus must take the following steps:

• The credit reporting agencies must resolve consumers' disputes within 30 days, unless you have used the services of annualcreditreport.com, then the bureaus can take up to 45 days.


• In response to consumers' complaints that documentation in support of their disputes was disregarded, the credit bureaus have to consider and transmit to the furnisher all relevant evidence submitted by the consumer the first time.


• Consumers will receive written notice of the results of the investigation within five days of its completion, including a copy of the amended credit file if it changed based on the dispute.


• Once information is deleted from a credit file, the credit bureaus can not reinsert it unless the entity supplying the information certifies that the item is complete and accurate and the credit bureau notifies the consumer within five days.

The FTC says that inaccurate credit reports are the number-one source of consumer complaints, and it is quite common for problems to take six or more months to be resolved. The big three agencies, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, are working on making sure that all disputes are handled within 30 days.

If the new investigation reveals an error, you may ask that a corrected version of the report be sent to anyone who received your report within the last six months. Job applicants can have corrected reports sent to anyone who received a report for employment purposes during the past two years. However, this is unlikely to repair any damage done when your credit report was first pulled, so don't waste your time or energy on this approach.